W2XR - Long Island City, NY

This station was
started by John V. L. Hogan, who began his career as a teenage assistant
to Dr. Lee DeForest. He pursued many experiments in his Radio Inventions
Laboratory at 140 Nassau St. in Manhattan and later at 31-04 Northern
Blvd., above a Ford garage in Long Island City.

By the late
1920's, Hogan had joined the parade of technical experts and tinkerers
trying to send mechanically scanned images through the air. Radio
Pictures, Inc. received a license in 1929 for an "experimental
broadcasting station" with the call sign W2XR. Television and
facsimile pictures were broadcast at 2100 to 2200 kHz.

In 1933, the
Federal Radio Commisson (FRC) authorized double-wide 20kc channels at
1530, 1550 and 1570 kilocycles, just past the top of the broadcast band
at the time. Hogan decided to accompany his television pictures with
classical records on 1550kc. Many of the better radios could tune the
frequency, and Hogan began to win an audience unaware of, or
uninterested in, video. The TV experiments were soon abandoned in favor
of achieving high-fidelity audio transmission.

This would evolve
into one of the nation's premier classical music stations (WQXR) and
make it the only radio station in New York to have begun life on
television.